


Learning to Fly

by echovalley26809



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Hopper-Byers Family, Post-Season/Series 03 AU, frank discussions of superpowers, gratuitous amount of heart-to-hearts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:21:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echovalley26809/pseuds/echovalley26809
Summary: Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as ‘the superhero talk’. Which means if Hopper and Joyce are going to give one, they’ll have to make it up themselves.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper & Jim "Chief" Hopper, Joyce Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper
Comments: 19
Kudos: 64





	Learning to Fly

It starts, as everything seems to start, with one of Will’s drawings.

“What’s this?” Joyce asks one afternoon when it’s just the two of them in the house (which is a rare occurrence these days) and Will is migrating from room to room, looking for spare change to spend at the arcade. Some of his recent sketches are still sitting on the kitchen table, and he cranes his neck to see which one she’s picked up.

“Oh, just ideas.”

The sheet of paper in Joyce’s hand is covered with what looks like a series of different skintight outfits, all brightly colored, some featuring capes, most including masks of some type.

“Ideas for what?” Although Halloween is over, she’s thinking maybe Will’s sketching out some new characters for one of the kids’ game nights.

Instead, he says, “El’s superhero suit.”

“El’s what?”

“Superhero suit. Like Peter Parker’s spider suit.”

Suddenly images of Halloween costumes and D&D campaigns are replaced by El, dressed vaguely like Spider-Man, running around downtown Hawkins in the middle of the night, beating up would-be burglars and drunk drivers in back alleys.

“Is this for one of your games?” Joyce looks up to find that Will has disappeared. Something inside her chest tightens. “Will?”

“What?” The living room, she realizes. He has disappeared to the living room. The tightness in her chest lingers, annoyingly, as she follows his voice and finds him digging through the couch for loose coins.

“Is this for a game?” she repeats and holds his drawing in front of her.

“Hmmmm?” His head emerges from under one of the cushions. “Oh, no, not really. I mean, I guess it _could_ be, but it was really just for fun.”

“Fun.”

Will’s head vanishes into the couch again. “Yeah,” he says, his voice muffled. “Like a ‘what if’.”

_What if._ Joyce’s brain starts doing a _what if_ of its own, the kind where it encounters something innocuous - like magnets falling off her fridge – and takes it to the logical extreme (and it doesn’t help that her brain is so often _right_ about these things), and right now the logical extreme is her daughter, in a cape and a mask, openly fighting criminals and monsters not just in Hawkins but all over the world as a bona fide superhero, the first _real_ superhero the world has ever seen, complete with a secret lair and a secret identity and a name like… like… Telekinetic Girl, or something, and _oh, God, why have I never considered this possibility before?_

Will, evidently satisfied with the bounty he retrieved from their furniture, is slipping on his shoes.

“Okay, but she’s not actually –,” Joyce starts to say, but she’s cut off by a _'_ _Bye, Mom! Love you!'_ and a kiss on the cheek. “Love you, too,” she stammers as he runs out the door.

-

Later that night, when Hopper is lying in bed, trying to read the parts of the newspaper he didn’t get to read that morning, Joyce waves Will’s drawing in front of his face.

“Look at what our kids are doing,” she says in a tone that tells him she is expecting him to react in a certain way, but as he glances at the drawing, and back at Joyce, he can’t figure out what way that is.

“Yeah?”

Joyce gestures to the paper wildly. “Look, Hop!”

Still confused, he takes it from her. “What is it?”

“What _is_ it?” She sounds incredulous, like she can’t believe how dumb he’s being right now. “It’s their ideas for superhero suits!”

_Oh, of fuckin’ course, please excuse me_ … is what he doesn’t say.

What he does say is, “Okay… Do you want me to say it’s good? Because it’s pretty good.” Joyce shakes her head, and for a second Hopper thinks she’s disagreeing with him, which is kind of weird considering how she usually gushes about Will’s artwork. Rightfully so, in Hop’s general opinion. The kid is pretty good. “No? It’s not good?”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” She leans over him, tapping the paper. “These are ideas for _El_.”

“What do you mean, ‘for El’?”

“For her career as a _superhero_.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look, our kid has superpowers, right?”

“Yeah…”

“So isn’t there a reasonable chance that when she grows up…” Joyce pauses, waiting for him to get it. He laughs when he finally does.

“ _That’s_ what this is about? You think El’s going to be, what, _Superman_?”

“I’m saying it’s _possible_. Isn’t it?”

It’s not actually something he’s considered before, but he still feels like he can say with certainty that his daughter is not about to emulate the stories in those comic books she and her friends seem to love so much with a hero’s journey of her own. Because, well, _sure_ , she closed the gate and killed the Demo-whatsits and fought that giant flesh-spider thing, but it’s not like she goes out of her way to _look_ for monsters to kill or interdimensional portals to close. And generally, she’s far more interested in using her powers to change the channels on the TV without moving from her spot on the couch, or summon snacks from the kitchen without moving from her spot on the couch, or do her chores without moving from her spot on the couch… basically, anything that means she doesn’t have to get up from the couch.

Hopper’s never actually read a comic book, but he’s pretty sure the people in those stories don’t spend their evenings vacuum-sealed to the sofa, leaving Cheetos dust on the cushions while they avoid their homework and watch TV all night.

Plus, he just can’t picture El running around in a cape and spandex and with a name like… like… Moves-Things-With-Her-Mind Girl. She’s just not the type.

“Joyce, it’s just a drawing.” He tries to pass the paper back to her.

Joyce scoffs and doesn’t take it. “For _now_. First it’s a drawing, then it’s a costume, then it’s ‘oh, Mom and Dad, I joined the debate team and that’s why I’m never home anymore’ except _not_ because she’s actually…” Joyce gestures to the paper again.

Hop rolls his eyes and wonders vaguely what Chrissy Carpenter is doing these days. Probably not talking to her husband about the possibility of their superpowered kid becoming a superhero.

Lucky bastard, whoever he is.

“I think you’re overreacting. El’s not stupid. She knows the rules.”

“Oh, and she’s going to follow those rules when she’s 25? Or 35? For the rest of her life, she’s going to follow the ‘don’t be stupid’ rules her dad made when she was 13?”

“Why wouldn’t she? They’re good rules.”

“What if _she_ wants something different?”

“Then she would have said something,” and Joyce appears to doubt that very much based on her raised eyebrows. Hopper volleys the look right back at her and insists, “She’s chatty about the stuff she wants,” though whether he’s trying to convince her or himself, he isn’t sure.

“Hop, she’s our kid, and I love her, but no one on this planet would describe her as ‘chatty’.”

Hopper can’t really argue with that. And because he knows a losing battle when he sees one, he asks, “So, what do you want to do?”

“We need to talk to her.” Hop groans because he knows what’s coming. “A heart-to-heart.” There it is.

“And by ‘we’ I’m guessing you mean me?”

“Don’t act so glum. You always make these things harder than they need to be.”

“ _Why_ can’t you do it?” She gives him a _look_ , and this time, he knows exactly what it means, and what it means is Joyce is going to get her way whether he likes it or not. He sighs and tries to miss the days when it was just him, living in the trailer by the lake, passing out in front of the TV every night with no one to care for and nothing to do, but he can’t quite do it. “Fine. I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

-

He puts it off.

Tomorrow comes, and he doesn’t get home until late because someone thought it would be funny to string a bunch of plastic owls around Eleanor Gillespie’s porch and he has to spend a not-insignificant portion of his evening explaining to a hysterical woman the difference between a ‘hate-crime’ and ‘gratuitous teenage mischief’.

Then the next day Eleven is in a surly mood because Ms. Ratliff gave her a detention ‘for no reason!’ and Hop mostly tries to stay out of her way. Then Joyce works late and he forgets. Then El sleeps over at Red’s house and he doesn’t get the chance. And every day has an excuse just like that until suddenly more than a week has gone by and he still hasn’t said one thing to El about superheroes, much to Joyce’s annoyance.

It’s not that he doesn’t like talking to his kid. Hell, for a long time, talking to her was the only good part of his day. And even now she’s still one of the best parts and one of his favorite people.

He’s just not good at ‘heart-to-hearts’. And it doesn’t sit right with him that Joyce is the one worried about something that El may or may not be doing but he has to be the one to sit the kid down and have a conversation about it.

In certain ways, they’re still two families instead of one. It’s kind of an unwritten rule in their house that if Jonathan or Will has an issue, Joyce takes point on dealing with it, and if Eleven has an issue, Hopper takes point. Joyce has more kids, but El has more issues, typically, so it tends to work out evenly.

It’s still a bad habit, Hopper thinks. He was never especially close to his father, and he struggles to relate to the boys, who carry their own father-son issues. And he knows El and Joyce sometimes pull away from each other because they feel guilty about Terry Ives. So it’s easy for all of them to fall back into the old, familiar patterns of their lives before they all started living together in the same house.

Joyce, though, isn’t nearly as bothered by their occasional two-family dynamic as Hopper is. Inevitably, she says, in every family, some people are going to be closer than others, and even though for them it might be more pronounced compared to some of the more ‘average’ families, at times, that doesn’t mean it’s not normal.

They argue about it, sometimes.

_Just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s what’s best, Joyce._

_Give it time, Hop. These things don’t change overnight._

It doesn’t help that Joyce also seems to think that the more ‘heart-to-hearts’ Hopper gives to El, the better they will both get at ‘interpersonal communication’ and ‘resolving conflict peacefully’, not just with each other but with everyone else, too. Somehow.

(“She _adores_ you. She copies everything you do. If _you_ get better at this, then _she_ will get better at this, and then she won’t get into so much trouble at school and we won’t have to go to so many parent-teacher conferences. It’s a win-win.”)

Hopper isn’t so sure about that.

Finally, Joyce is working late again and Hopper’s milling around the kitchen after dinner, doing the dishes, opening and closing the fridge, the cabinets, the drawers, drinking about three beers too many, and thinking about how pissy Joyce is going to be if she comes home and finds out he still hasn’t had that talk with their kid…

He knocks on her bedroom door, which is already ajar, and simultaneously pushes it open. “Hey, kid?” he asks. “Can I talk to you about…” He freezes at the scene in front of him. “…something?”

She’s sitting on her bed with Will and she’s got a cape around her shoulders and a mask on her face and Will’s got his mom’s sewing kit laid out in front of them next to a pile of colorful fabric spilling onto the floor.

“Yes?” El asks.

_First, it’s a drawing, then it’s a costume, then it’s … ‘debate team’_. That’s what Joyce said. She’s right, of course. She’s _always_ right. When is he going to learn that Joyce Byers is _always goddam right_? She was right about Will, she was right about the magnets, and now she’s right about their kid being a _superhero_ …

If Eleven even notices his prolonged silence, she doesn’t show it, but Hopper can tell that Will is starting to get weirded out.

“Do you want me to leave?” Will asks.

Instead of responding, Hopper backs out of the room slowly, retreats to the kitchen, grabs another beer, and waits for Joyce to get home.

-

“You were right!” Hopper damn near shouts, making Joyce jump as she walks through the front door late that evening. “You were right! Our kids are insane!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Will and El are…” Hop gestures to the hallway behind him. “…making _superhero costumes_.”

“ _What_?” Joyce peeks down the hall. Shadows move in the light under the closed door to El’s room. She turns back to Hopper. “I told you to talk to her like a week ago!” she whisper-yells.

“Yeah, well, I waited until tonight!”

“Well, what did she say?”

“What?”

“When you asked if she wanted to be a superhero. What did she say?”

“I… uh…”

“You didn’t ask?”

“…No.”

“What _did_ you say?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Did you say _anything_?”

“I guess… not.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No.”

Joyce rolls her eyes. “’Friends don’t lie.’”

“I’m not _drunk_. And don’t say that.”

“That’s not what I asked. Hey.” She tugs the front of his shirt, not quite forcing him to look at her but keeping him from walking away. “What’s going on?”

“I got… nervous.” He pointedly avoids her eyes. “She’s gonna get herself kidnapped. Or _killed_. Jesus.”

“No, she’s not,” Joyce says, her voice soft.

“You can’t know that.”

She puts her arms around him, pulls his chest into the side of her face, feels him put his arms around her. “No,” she admits. “But I’m always right.”

-

“V-I-G-I-L-A-N-T-E. You know what that means?” Hopper asks.

“Yes,” Eleven says.

That surprises him. He’s sitting across from her at the dining room table with the dictionary open between them and attempting to have a ‘heart-to-heart’, specifically focusing on ‘superheroes’ and ‘why you shouldn’t be one’. “You do?”

She nods and leans forward in her chair so she can jab him in the chest. “You.”

“What?”

“You. Vigilante.”

Thinking maybe she’s conflating the idea of someone who takes the law into their own hands with his job as police chief, he starts to explain. “No, I’m –,”

“You sneak into the lab,” she interrupts. “You go into the Upside-Down. You fight monsters. You hide me from the bad men. _Vigilante_.”

Hopper stares at her in stunned silence. And it takes him a couple of tries to start speaking again. “Uh… well, that’s – that’s – you know what, we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you know, this, uh, thing you’re doing with Will. When you were making superhero costumes?”

She brightens. “It’s fun.”

“No, no, no, it’s not fun.”

Her face falls. “Not fun?”

“No. It’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous… to wear costumes?”

“Dangerous to fight crime in costumes.” He sounds like an idiot.

“I don’t do that,” she says slowly, confused.

“But maybe… you want to?”

“What?”

Hop realizes he started at the wrong end of this lecture, and he probably should have just asked her straight up what _she_ wanted. _Like Joyce told him to in the first place_.

“Kid, do you want to be a superhero or not? Is that what this is? Trying on costumes? I mean, you have…” He gestures vaguely to her face and head area. “You know.”

“Will said superheroes aren’t real.”

“Yeah, but only because nobody has superpowers.” He actually _sees_ the moment the epiphany strikes – the instant her face crosses from bored and a little confused to lit up with realization – and he knows immediately that he’s made a horrible, horrible mistake. “No, no, no, whatever you’re thinking, _no_.”

“I _could_.”

“No.”

“I have…” She mimics him, gesturing vaguely to her face and head area.

“No.”

“I can –,”

“ _No_.”

She glares at him. “I can _help_ ,” she says firmly.

He sighs. She’s not wrong. The truth is… she could do a lot of good. _She could save lives,_ he thinks. _She_ has _saved lives._

He shakes the thoughts away as quickly as they come. Hers is the only life he cares about.

“I want you to stay safe. You can be the superhero who calls 911.”

She scoffs. “Boring.”

“ _Safe_ ,” he repeats. “Promise?”

_Promise_ is one of those words that still carries a lot of weight for her, and by extension, him. Knowing how seriously she takes the concept, he tries not to abuse it by making her _promise_ relatively unimportant things like eat her peas or clean her room, and when she asks it of him in turn, he tries to take it as seriously as she does. Lately, though, she’s been stretching or narrowing the definition of the word as much as possible in a transparent attempt to see just how much she can get away with. Joyce calls it ‘being a teenager.’ Hop calls it ‘being a little shit.’

Sure enough…

“Promise,” she says. And with a look of defiance, she adds, “To stay safe.”

“I’m serious, El.”

“ _I’m_ serious,” she retorts. “ _My_ life.”

“So what happens when the bad men find out there’s a person in a mask and a cape running around Hawkins with the exact same superpowers as the girl who escaped from their lab? What happens then?”

They both know what happens. Benny Hammond is what happens.

“The bad men won’t know.”

“What do you mean they won’t know?”

“They know Eleven. Not Jane Hopper.”

Great. She’s got an alias all lined up and ready to go. Courtesy of _him_.

“They still know who Eleven’s friends were,” he points out. “You don’t think they’ll hurt any of us to try and find you? And besides…” He reaches across the table and pushes his finger under the blue hair tie around her wrist and lifts it away from the skin, exposing the 011 tattoo underneath.

It’s kind of a low blow, and he doesn’t blame her when she yanks her arm away. But they’ve been in much worse places, the two of them, and he has an important point to make. A point that, based on the look on her face, El hears loud and clear.

_Oh, a tattoo, you say? Of the number 11? Yeah, I think the police chief’s daughter has one just like that._

And if she were really mad at him, she would leave. She doesn’t.

She doesn’t give in, either, though.

“You said I have choices now,” she says.

He did say that. Or, to be more accurate, he said she would have _more_ choices. It was after the gate, when he’d been pitching her on a ‘fresh start’ after keeping her cooped up in the cabin for almost a year after she’d spent the 12 before – _her entire life!_ – cooped up in a lab. Choice is important, especially when it’s always been taken away, and Hop tries to give El as many as possible, but the key word there, obviously, is _possible_.

There’s no kind or fair way to tell any kid – let alone a kid who was experimented on and raised as a weapon – that they can’t be anything they want to be, no matter what their teachers or all those afterschool specials preach. The world just doesn’t work like that. Sometimes you run out of money or into bad luck. Sometimes you don’t have the skill, or you don’t have the look, or you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sometimes the government would love nothing more than to gets its grubby hands on you and is more than willing to kill anyone who tries to stand in its way.

And sometimes… sometimes you get hit with a stupid goddam diagnosis and a million unsuccessful weeks of chemo and you just… well.

Sara couldn’t be an astronaut. El can’t be a superhero.

That’s just the way it is.

None of him particularly wants to say any of that out loud, though, and El’s eyes are on him, waiting for a response.

So, Hop switches trajectory entirely.

“How about this.” He digs into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. Flipping it open, he grabs a twenty and slides it across the table. “You promise not to be a superhero, and I give you $20.”

Money is still kind of a foreign concept to her. She understands that money is what people get in exchange for having jobs and that it can be used to acquire just about anything you want or need under the sun, but for a while she couldn’t quite grasp its importance relative to her. For so long, the things she wanted, money couldn’t buy. Freedom. Friendship. Family. But now that she’s been in the world for a while, maybe she’ll be able to look at $20 and see movie tickets, or a long Saturday at the arcade with her friends, or hell, even boxes and boxes of Eggos. He doesn’t care.

El stares at him, her face unreadable, and says nothing. She doesn’t move to take the money. Hop rolls his eyes, pulls out another twenty and lays it on top of the first.

She snatches both bills and stands up.

“Hey,” he says, before she can walk away. “Promise?”

“Promise,” she says.

_Good,_ he thinks. _Problem solved._

-

“You did _what_?”

They’re in the kitchen, putting groceries away. Or at least Joyce is putting groceries away while Hopper is rummaging through the bags with the intention of finding something to eat, and when Joyce passes him a bag of chips to put in the cabinet, he pops the bag open and abandons the task at hand to lean comfortably against the refrigerator and snack.

“I fixed the problem,” he says.

“I thought you were going to talk to her about, like, good and evil.” Joyce gestures for him to move so she can put a new carton of milk in the fridge. Hop shifts his position to in front of the counter.

“Why would you think that?”

“That’s what all the comic book parents tell their superhero kids.”

That is not true. There are no parenting books for raising future superheroes, so upon realizing that she might have a future superhero burgeoning in her own family, Joyce turned to the only resource available: Will’s comic book collection. And much to her mortification, she discovered that most comic book parents are, in fact, _dead_.

(She faults the writers, mostly. _Lack of creativity_ , she tells herself. _No imagination_.

It does little to help her anxiety.)

Of the few who are still alive, fewer are aware of their children’s activities, which Joyce finds even more unbelievable. _How do you not know your nephew is Spider-Man!_

The comics yield enough clues, however, in flashbacks and soliloquies, to show that some parents, at least, before they kicked it, gave some kind of vague speech about power and responsibility and the importance of joining (or leading) the never-ending fight against injustice. Or something.

Hop looks less than thrilled. “I’m sorry, I thought the point was for her to _not_ become a superhero.”

“If she really wants to do it, then she’s going to do it.” Joyce snatches the bag of chips from him, folds the top of the bag down, and disappears it into a cabinet. Hop resigns himself to unloading canned vegetables onto whatever empty shelf space he can find.

“She better not,” he grumbles. “Or I better get my $40 back.”

“We can’t stop her. And we have to be supportive no matter what she decides.”

“She _promised_. That’s like…” He raises his hand up over his head, evidently an attempt to indicate something akin to _top-tier_ or _really important_. Joyce just stares at him. “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

“I will talk to her.”

“Oh, no you won’t. You’ll just feed her some inspirational crap that’ll make her want to do it.”

“I’m just going to tell her that if she decides to do it then she needs to be careful and that she should talk to us about it beforehand. And that she should wait until she’s older, but –,”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean ‘wait until she’s older’? You don’t think she’s gonna start doing this _now_ , do you?”

Joyce shrugs. “I don’t know. Peter Parker was in high school when he became Spider-Man.”

“Who’s Peter Parker?”

“You really need to start reading comic books.”

He rolls his eyes. “This is real life, Joyce.”

“Yeah, real life with monsters and portals and a teenager with telekinesis.”

“You know, none of this would even be happening if you hadn’t gotten it in your head that she wanted to be a superhero. She wasn’t gonna do it at all until that stupid heart-to-heart gave her the idea.”

“She’s smart,” Joyce says as she tries to wedge a box of Eggos into an already-packed freezer. “She would have gotten there eventually. And look, honestly, I don’t want her to do it either.”

“You don’t?”

“Of course not. She’s not even bulletproof.” Joyce hesitates, suddenly uncertain. “That we know of.”

“So if neither of us want her to do it, what exactly is the problem?”

“The problem is outright _forbidding_ her isn’t going to work. Remember what happened when you _forbade_ her from leaving the cabin?”

Hop’s quiet for a moment, which means he does remember and quite possibly realizes that Joyce might be right. _Again_. “This is different.”

_It’s not that different_ , Joyce thinks, but she concedes his point. “I know. But we can’t abandon all reason just because we have a young Clark Kent living in this house.”

“Who’s Clark Kent?”

“How do you know who Superman is but not Clark Kent?”

“What are they brothers or something?”

Joyce rolls her eyes.

-

Though she’s never been the kind of person to shy away from being whoever her kids need her to be, Joyce has always been grateful that her boys are more interested in art than athletics. She doesn’t want to be the mom who watches her babies get hurt on the football field or hockey rink or basketball court, who carries around ice packs and first aid kits, ready to be the one who stitches them up after a particularly enthusiastic game, or match, or whatever.

But if Will or Jonathan decided sports was something they wanted to do, then Joyce would be there, with cheers and pride but also with bandages and antiseptic and hoping to whatever God exists that she won’t need the latter.

And if El decides she wants to be a superhero, then Joyce… (she takes a deep breath) …will be there, too. Like at the mall, when Joyce and Hopper had to improvise emergency services with whatever they could find in the food court in order to stitch up the gaping wound in their kid’s leg.

As Eleven eyes the comic books spread across the dining room table with more than a little wariness, Joyce makes a mental note to fill out the medicine cabinet with more sophisticated supplies, God forbid the need should ever arise.

“What are we doing?” El asks.

“We are going to have a discussion.”

“About comic books?”

“Kind of. Mostly about you.”

El sighs. “We have to?”

“Yes. I know you talked to your dad, and I want to talk to you, too.”

El leans back and slouches so far down in her chair that Joyce is surprised it’s still holding her up, and the look on her face is so reminiscent of the same casually disinterested expression that Joyce has seen Hopper make so many times at the police station and during meetings with El’s teachers that it throws her off for a few seconds. Even without the birth certificate, nobody in town would believe Jim and Jane Hopper aren’t biologically related.

Before she gets carried away by her own distractions, Joyce refocuses herself and gestures to the comics on the table. “Have you read any of these?”

El studies the arrangement in front of her and doesn’t answer right away. Protracted silences are often a side effect of conversations with Eleven, and Joyce isn’t as good at navigating them as Hopper is. Too eager to fix problems, too adept at jumping to conclusions, and Joyce reminds herself to be patient as El internally wrestles with the best way to turn thoughts into speech.

As the seconds tick by, however, and El continues not responding, Joyce realizes it’s not syntax that’s tripping her up, nor is it any kind of rebellious adolescence that’s becoming more common in their house, but something else entirely, and Joyce can’t put her finger on what it is until El looks up almost apprehensively, like she’s trying to gauge Joyce’s reaction, and Joyce suddenly recognizes the agonizing look of a kid who is searching for the right answer to a question that has no wrong answers. It’s a look that’s become unfortunately familiar. Someone asks El an uncomplicated question – _What do you want to eat? Are you tired? Are you sick? Do you need help?_ – and sometimes instead of answering truthfully, El tries to figure out what she thinks the other person wants to hear.

Joyce hasn’t yet figured out the pattern of when questions prompt ‘the look’, only that everyone gets hit with it occasionally, particularly adults who aren’t her or Hopper.

(Some of El’s teachers can be especially aggravating about it. About that and also about El’s lengthy pauses and the weird gaps in her knowledge and her sometimes bizarre sentence structure and a whole host of other things that they think adds up to _insubordination_ instead of _a poor kid who’s been through Hell and back and now needs as much help as she can get_ and a parent-teacher conference can so quickly devolve into a shouting match and then Joyce is the one seething and Hop’s the one giving the lecture about ‘resolving conflict peacefully’ on the drive home.

Whatever. She’s not sorry.)

She reaches over and squeezes El’s hand in reassurance. “There’s no wrong answer, sweetheart.”

At that, Eleven seems to relax and picks out a handful of comics. Wonder Woman. X-Men. Spider-Man. And Superman.

“Great. Now, all these characters have abilities, you know, super speed, super strength, super… web-shooter-thing, and because of those abilities, they decided they have the responsibility to help the people who need help. Right?”

“Right.”

“Right, okay. So, like these characters, you’ve also sometimes decided to use your abilities to help people. Mostly so far it’s been people you know, I think. But someday, when you’re older, you might decide you want to do more.”

El looks confused. “I promised Hop…”

“Yeah, I know.” Joyce tries not to let irritation seep into her voice, but she cannot fathom why the Hoppers are holding up this $40 transaction as a binding, sacred agreement that will last forever instead of calling it the cheap bribe that it is. “And I don’t want you to break your promise, but sometimes people discover that what they wanted when they were young is completely different from what they want when they get older. You might feel one way right now, but you’ll continue to grow and change, and your powers will continue to grow and change, and that might –,”

“They _will_?”

Joyce is taken aback by El’s shock and surprise. “Yeah, I – they have already, haven’t they? You don’t need the bath anymore to find people…”

This is apparently brand new information, which Joyce kind of finds astonishing. She can’t help but think if _she_ were the teenager with superpowers, she would be testing her abilities every day, pushing the boundaries of what she could do, searching for the limits of her gifts…

And actually, maybe it’s best that El prefers watching TV.

But Joyce realizes she may have opened up a can of worms as Eleven grabs one of the X-Men comics and flips through it, stopping on a two-page spread of Storm conjuring a… well, storm.

“Do you think I can do this?” El asks Joyce, who, at this moment, is slightly speechless.

“Oh, um…”

Joyce is about to say _no_ , _those aren’t the kind of changes I meant_ but she’s suddenly struck by the uncertainty of the entire situation – they don’t know _anything_ about how El’s powers work or how they might change in the future.

Poor Martha Kent, who Joyce is commiserating with more and more these days, might have once thought super strength and super speed were the extent of her son’s abilities, not knowing that x-ray vision, heat vision, super breath, _flight_ , etc., etc., etc., were coming down the pike.

Who’s to say that El couldn’t one day summon a tornado? In fact, who’s to say she couldn’t do that _now_? If she can move cars and vans, then there’s no reason she shouldn’t be able to move air and water molecules, too. Right?

_This is not what you wanted to talk about_ , Joyce reminds herself. She gently tugs the comic out of El’s grasp. “We’re getting a little off topic.”

But as Joyce moves the X-Men comic aside, El simply shifts her attention to a Superman comic and flips it open to a page where Superman appears to be flying through the air, carrying a car over his head, and she looks up at Joyce with a question in her eyes.

Joyce doesn’t have an answer.

-

“It didn’t go the way I wanted it to.”

They’re in the bedroom, folding laundry, most of which happens to consist of flannel shirts. Joyce can never keep track which flannels belong to which Hopper (if asked, both would try to claim them all) so she just stacks the shirts neatly into a pile to be fought over later.

“Did she give the money back?” Hopper asks.

“No.”

“Then it’s fine.”

Joyce fights the urge to say something sarcastic. Instead, she thinks about her and Eleven’s failed heart-to-heart and asks, “Do you think El can control the weather?”

Hop looks at her like she’s crazy. “What?”

“Well, she can move things with her mind, right? So, clouds are things. Molecules are things. That’s what weather is. Clouds and air molecules and…” Halfway through that sentence, Joyce realizes she doesn’t quite know how the weather works. Hop just stares at her blankly. “…and cold fronts…”

“What, are you planning a picnic or something? You want her to make sure it’s a nice day?”

This is so far off base that Joyce thinks it’s a wonder the two of them can even communicate at all. “I’m just trying to be aware of any possible… power evolutions.”

“Power evolution? What is that?”

“Like how she only needs a blindfold now instead of a bathtub to find people. What else is going to change as she gets older? Like, can she start _fires_ with her mind? Can she turn invisible?”

“Are you just picking things at random?”

“Can she _fly_?”

Hopper suddenly looks deeply uncomfortable. _Suspiciously_ uncomfortable.

“What?” Joyce asks. And then, when he doesn’t answer, “ _Jim_?”

“Um, at the gate, she, uh…” He holds his hand flat and raises it to his eyeline and doesn’t seem capable of explaining whatever El did at the gate further than that single motion. “I don’t know. She might be able to fly. We’ve never talked about it.”

“What do you mean you’ve _never_ talked about it?”

He shrugs. “It never came up.”

“Things don’t always _come_ up. Sometimes you have to _bring_ them up.”

“Well, nobody brought it up.”

_So, flight is a possibility,_ Joyce thinks. She doesn’t completely discount weather-control, but it does lose its spot at the top of her ‘keep an eye on’ list. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t know that was something you would want to know about.”

“ _Of course_ I would want to know if my kid can fly.”

“I’m sorry. Okay?”

“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Joyce grumbles without any actual malice behind it. Hop just cheekily grins at her. “Is there anything else you forgot to tell me? Does El burst into flame like Johnny Storm?”

“Who’s Johnny Storm?”

“Oh, my God…” Joyce mutters and leaves the room. When she returns, she dumps a pile of Will’s comic books into Hop’s arms.

“Um.”

“You need to read those.”

“Why?”

"Because this is our life now."

"Joyce..."

“And because I don’t think you’re one hundred percent certain she’s going to keep that $40, and we need to be prepared if she doesn’t.”

Hop sighs.

(Later that week, he calls Joyce at work in the middle of the afternoon, shouting, “How do you not know your kid is Spider-Man!”

“I know!” Joyce shouts back, startling a few of the customers. “It’s ridiculous!”)

-

El loves Mike’s basement.

It’s the first place she can remember waking up feeling safe. Her first glimpse at a normal house. More color than she’d ever seen in one place. More _stuff_. It’s where she tried Eggos – and countless other foods – for the first time, where she learned what ‘friend’ means, and where Mike called her from for 353 days. It feels as much like home as the cabin or the house she lives in now with Hop and the Byers, and maybe it always will.

Sometimes she eats dinner at Mike’s house, either just her with Mike’s family or with all their friends squished around the table while Mike’s mom makes comments about ‘cooking enough for 30’ and ‘a houseful of teenagers’, though El thinks Mrs. Wheeler secretly likes it when they crowd her table and eat all her food.

And while El’s pretty sure Mike’s dad doesn’t even know her name, sometimes Mike’s mom looks at her like she’s trying to figure out where she’s seen her before. Hop says that telling her the truth would lead to ‘a grade-A Karen Wheeler freakout’ and she would ‘probably call the National Guard’ and Mike says telling her the truth would lead to him being ‘grounded for eternity’ so when Mrs. Wheeler starts looking at El kind of sideways, Mike cuts the conversation short and El escapes with everyone else down to the basement.

They’re down there one night when Dustin says, “Byers, we need to talk.”

“I’m listening,” Will says.

“All right, I can’t give you the details, but I’m currently in the middle of some complex negotiations with a party who shall remain nameless, and in order for this deal to go through, I’m gonna need my X-Men #134 back. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“What deal?”

“I can’t give you the details.”

“Keith told Dustin that he’s got a new gaming system that he claims is better than Atari and Dustin wants to play it.”

“Shut it, Lucas. This is none of your concern.”

“What system?” Will asks.

“One that doesn’t exist. Dustin’s getting conned.”

“Shut it, Lucas!”

“I’m telling you, man, he’s _lying_.”

“No, no, no. It’s a new system that’s not out yet in America, and his dad got it on a business trip to Japan.”

Max looks at Dustin like she feels sorry for him. “Oh, Dustin…”

“His dad goes on business trips all the time! Why am I even discussing this with you guys. This is between me and Will. Will, I know what you’re thinking. But you’re not gonna buy any screentime with a single comic book. Believe me, I tried. The best thing to do is give me the comic, and with the other items that are currently on the negotiation table, I can get in, _verify…_ ” Dustin glares at Lucas and Max. Mike snickers. “…that the goods are as advertised and then maybe, through further negotiations, I can get playing opportunities for other interested parties.”

“Oh, like a reconnaissance mission.”

“Exactly. Like a reconnaissance mission. Yes.”

“Sorry, Dustin. I wish I could help you, but my parents took all my comics.”

“What, as like a punishment or something?”

Will shrugs. “I don’t know. They’re worried El wants to be Jean Grey when she grows up.”

“Why are they worried?” Lucas asks. “That would be _awesome_.”

“Can you imagine the look on Troy’s face when he realizes the same girl who broke his arm is a real-life X-Man?”

“He’d piss himself all over again!”

Everyone laughs, and Dustin turns back to Will. “Look, Will, just explain to your parents that you’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime – of a _lifetime_ – here. Hey.” He puts his hand on Will’s shoulder and looks at him seriously. “I can’t do this without you.” Lucas rolls his eyes.

“I can ask, but Hop was pretty freaked out after he found us making a superhero suit, so I don’t think –,”

“Whoa!” Dustin shouts.

“Hold up,” Lucas says. “A superhero suit?”

“Are you saying this is for real?” Max asks. “Like, _for real_ for real?”

El glances at Will. Everyone keeps reacting to the thought of her becoming a superhero as if it’s a _big deal_ that should be taken _very seriously_ , even though truthfully, the entire thing had just been a fun idea that El and Will liked to imagine – almost like a game of pretend – and she hadn’t even considered doing it, as Max says, _for real_ until Hop pointed out that she _could_ do it for real. And even then, she’d only entertained the notion for a few minutes before Hop offered her money to never do it, and since it was something she was never actually planning on doing in the first place, taking the money seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.

But then Joyce sat her down to talk about it, too, and now her friends are staring at her, and Will only shrugs as if to say, _it’s your decision,_ and maybe… maybe she _should_ think about it.

“I don’t know,” El says. “Maybe.”

Dustin’s eyes almost pop out of their sockets. “Holy shit.”

Max’s mouth is hanging open. Lucas is making a face like he’s waiting for someone to say this is a joke. And Mike…

Mike looks thoughtful for a moment, then asks, “Can we see it?”

-

They ride their bikes to her and Will’s house. Soon, Lucas will get his ‘driver’s license’, he says, and then he’ll be able to drive them all in his mom’s van, but that’s still months away.

El doesn’t mind riding bikes. She’s on Jonathan’s old bike, which he gave to her soon after Hop and Joyce started dating. It carries a faint energy that reminds her of – and makes her feel close to – its former owner, just like all the stuff she has that used to belong to other people. Hop’s old shirts. Will’s old room. Jonathan’s old bike. Joyce’s… El will find something to steal from Joyce.

Max tells her that having her own identity is important, and she’s right, but it’s important, too, El thinks, to surround yourself with the people you care about, through photos and memories and anything they’ve left a trace of themselves. She’s never had that before, and she likes the feeling it gives her.

Plus it’s funny when Hop can’t find his shirts.

The six of them leave their bikes in front of the porch and go inside single-file, like a parade, and Hopper watches them with trepidation as they walk by him one at a time. Eleven, the end of the chain, gives her best innocent smile and follows her friends down the hall to her room.

Will digs through her closet and withdraws the unfinished garment. “It’s just a mask and a cape so far,” he says, passing the pieces to their friends.

“This is so cool,” Dustin says as he peers through the mask’s eyeholes.

Max holds the cape like a flag. “You guys made this?”

“Will made it,” El says.

“This is really good.”

“Put it on!”

“Yeah, put it on.”

El obliges, sliding the mask over her face and swinging the cape around her neck. It’s not much, especially over her normal clothes, but her friends react like they’re watching Bruce Wayne put on the Batsuit.

“You’re gonna need a name,” Dustin says, suddenly serious. “Like… _Phoenix_.”

“Copyright,” Max says.

“No,” Lucas says. _“Prestige_.”

“Copyright,” Max repeats.

“I got it, I got it, I got it,” Dustin says. “ _Moondragon_.”

“Does no one understand what ‘copyright’ means?” Max asks.

Sounds of a hushed conversation drift in from the hallway, and El sticks her head out the door to find Hop and Joyce standing outside her room and having a whispered argument about… something.

“Can I help you?” El asks.

For a long second, they just stare at the mask and cape that El hasn’t yet taken off. Hop breaks out of the spell first. “If you can’t keep your promise, I’m gonna need my 40 bucks back.”

“I am keeping my promise,” El says as Joyce pulls Hop away. “I am allowed to wear costumes.”

When she steps back into her room, Will’s got a pen and a notebook and is trying to quickly jot down the flurry of ideas coming from Max, Lucas, and Dustin as they loudly debate possible additions – El hears the words ‘body armor’ and ‘utility belt’ – for the full costume design.

Mike is standing by the door.

“Are your parents mad?” he asks.

“No. They’re just weird.”

He laughs and then awkwardly clears his throat. “I, uh, wanted to tell you. It’s cool. This, I mean. Being a superhero. Now, or like, when we’re older. The whole thing is cool.”

“Cool?”

“ _Really_ cool. Like, the coolest thing ever, basically.”

El smiles. “Cool.”

-

They trade off on who takes Eleven to visit her mom and aunt. It’s Hop more often than not, partly because he works fewer weekends but mostly because, though she’s not at all proud to admit it, Joyce doesn’t like going.

Because honestly, Joyce sometimes feels like she’s just the last in a long line of people who conspired to take a woman’s baby away from her. She thinks about Will or Jonathan, kidnapped directly after birth and then ultimately rescued and raised by _strangers_ (well-meaning and loving strangers but strangers nonetheless) and never truly getting to see her boys again.

It’s a very specific kind of heartbreaking.

But she knows that’s not fair to Hopper or Eleven, so when Hop finds out the new mayor expects him to be at an event on the same Saturday that he was planning to take El to see the Ives, Joyce tells him she’ll take El instead.

“You sure?” he asks. “I can just take her next weekend.”

“It’s fine,” Joyce says and convinces herself it’s true. “I’ll go tell her.”

El is lying on her bed reading a magazine when Joyce pokes her head in the doorway. A stack of homework, Joyce notes, sits untouched on the floor.

“Hey.” El looks up. “Your dad has to work this weekend, so instead of him taking you to your mom’s, I’m gonna take you, okay?”

Instead of an ‘okay’ or a ‘fine’ or even an attempt at sarcasm, which she’s been trying out lately, El asks, “Do I have to go?” and she sounds so much like a young Will asking if he has to see Lonnie that it stops Joyce cold.

Joyce is pretty sure that none of the shit Lonnie put them through is happening at the Ives house, partly because Terry is still essentially catatonic, partly because Becky seems intimidated by El’s mere presence, and partly because, other than that time when El spent the night before absconding to Chicago, she’s never been there without either Joyce or Hopper.

But if it is… well then, quite frankly, neither Becky nor Terry will ever see El again.

Joyce closes the door. “Why don’t you want to go?”

El, per usual, doesn’t answer right away, and the silence is excruciating. Joyce sits on the edge of the bed as El swings her legs around until she, too, is sitting, and Joyce tells herself _patience, patience, patience,_ until finally, El says, “I can’t save her. I always try. It doesn’t work. She doesn’t wake up.”

Ah. Guilt.

Joyce sighs and puts her arm around El, hugging her close. “Oh, honey. You can’t save everyone, I’m afraid.”

“But… I have to try?”

Joyce then realizes this isn’t the kind of guilt that occurs as a byproduct of the inability to love someone out of illness or pain. This is the kind of guilt that manifests when for your entire life you’ve been told you’re one thing and one thing only, and if you can’t meet those expectations, then you’re a failure.

_I want to save your son_ , Dr. Brenner once told Joyce. _But I can’t do that. Not without your help_.

Joyce wonders how many times he said something similar to El.

All at once, she gives up on being the good superhero mom. The kind who focuses on responsibility, and justice, and the importance of battling evil, who tells her child to never stop fighting the good fight, to stand for something greater, to be a beacon of hope for the world.

Instead, Joyce says what she actually wants to say.

“No. You don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“I love your heart, and I love your kindness, and I love that you care so much about other people, but… their lives are not your responsibility. Do you understand that?”

El, apparently, does not understand that. “You – you’re talking about Mama?”

“I’m talking about _everyone_.”

Because Eleven is not a weapon. She’s not a gun to keep pointed at the door to make sure the monsters don’t come through. She’s not a bomb to drop on whoever the bad guys happen to be. She’s not an insurance policy to pull out whenever some Icarus flies too close to the sun.

She’s just a kid.

A kid whose favorite food is Eggos, who still struggles to speak in complete sentences, who loves bright colors and hates the dark, who’s a kind, sweet girl with a heart of gold and a sarcastic little shit – sometimes both at the same time – and whose superpowers are _nobody else’s goddam business_.

“Everyone, like…”

Joyce goes straight for the heart, so no misinterpretation is possible. “You didn’t have to help me save Will.”

Eleven looks at her like she’s crazy, and maybe she is. “He would die.”

“That would _not_ be your fault.”

“ _I_ opened the gate.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re responsible for every bad thing that comes through the damn thing or that you have to feel bad every time people die trying to reopen it. And if someone does, you _don’t_ have to be the one to close it. You don’t have to keep cleaning up everyone else’s messes.” Joyce runs a hand through El’s hair and down her cheek, lingering on her face. “Listen to me. You don’t have to spend your whole life fighting monsters if you don’t want to. It is _everyone’s_ responsibility to make this world a better place. Not just yours.”

Joyce has nightmares about the CIA, the FBI, nondescript government agents in suits and ties, the _bad men_ , showing up at – or _kicking in_ – their front door, taking her kid, and killing everyone else. She dreams about dissections, vivisections, autopsy tables, faceless surgeons with scalpels and bone saws taking her daughter apart as they search for the source of El’s powers, and she always wakes up gasping, with what feels like a tight band around her chest and her stomach turning over, and she has to go sit in El’s room for a while and watch her sleep.

Watch her _breathe_.

But Joyce thinks, too, about the so-called _good guys_ , the Dr. Owenses of the world, who say they’re just trying to stop more bad things from happening, who might see Eleven as an easy solution to whatever problems are currently plaguing the country or the planet – or their _jobs_ – and come knocking. They would ask politely (or at least _more_ politely) and they would explain that their requests come in the name of peace or some other bullshit.

_We need her,_ they would say. _She can stop the wars. She can save lives._

_Fuck your wars_ , Joyce would say before slamming the door in their faces. _Stop the fighting yourself if you care so much. Leave her alone._

_Leave_ my kid _alone._

Eleven thinks carefully. “What if the monsters win?”

“Then they win, and we’ll all find a way to live with it,” Joyce says, though she knows it’s more complicated than that.

Joyce knows the monsters that come out of the Upside-Down might be unstoppable but for the kid sitting next to her. She knows if it’s not the Americans or the Russians then it’ll be somebody else, that governments around the world will continue believing an alternate dimension is just another opportunity to seize power, or money, or whatever it is they’re looking for, no matter how many dead bodies – brothers, friends, nice guys who work at Radio Shack, scientists who like Looney Toons and cherry slurpees from 7/11 – are left in their wake. She knows that Eleven loves this world too much to let it be swallowed by darkness.

But someone’s got to get the weight of the world off this kid’s shoulders before she lets herself be crushed to death.

El looks skeptical. “Live with monsters?”

“Is that crazy?” Joyce asks, softly smiling.

“Maybe.”

“Okay, so maybe we go somewhere the monsters can’t find us. Like Alaska. Or Australia.”

“California.”

“Or California.”

With El leaning hard against her side, Joyce wraps both her arms around her kid and rests her chin on the top of El’s head. She pictures how relaxing California would be, with the sun and the beaches and the ocean and no mall full of Russian spies or gate to another dimension.

That would be nice, she thinks.

“El?”

“Hmmm?”

“You’d tell me if you could fly, right?”

“Um. Yes?”

-

Saturday detention.

_Again_.

_At least she managed not to get suspended this time_ , Hopper tells himself as he drags his ass out of bed at the crack of dawn to drive his kid to school on a _Saturday._ (“Go easy on her,” Joyce murmurs from their bed. Their nice, _warm_ bed.) Eleven’s up already, looking miserable, but at least she’s dressed and waiting for him instead of putting up a fight.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s get this over with.”

The drive to the school is silent, and he can’t help but think that he’s screwing this up, but he’s also tired of having the same damn conversation over and over. If she doesn’t want to listen, then she’ll have to reap the consequences, and he won’t bend over backwards to help a kid who doesn’t want to be helped.

(That isn’t true. It never will be.

It’s just so _early_.)

He pulls into the parking lot early, several minutes before she has to be inside or risk getting _another_ detention, and while it would be easy to kick her out now and go find some caffeine (and maybe some bacon and eggs), he figures he ought to at least make an attempt. _Again_.

“Kid, you gotta stop doing this.” El gives no indication that she’s even heard him. He sighs. “Look –,”

“Do you remember,” El says suddenly, “when it was just us?”

“Uh, you mean in the cabin?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I remember. What about it?”

“Everything was easy.”

Hopper almost laughs. “ _Easy_?”

She thinks for a moment. “ _Simple_ ,” she amends. “Everything was _simple_.”

He’s kind of surprised that she’s reminiscing on her time in the cabin in the same way some people reminisce on their idyllic childhoods – Eleven’s life is so far removed from anything resembling an ‘idyllic’ childhood that it _still_ makes him see red, and maybe always will – but he’s glad that she can look back on that year and see the good he was trying to do for her instead of just more memories of captivity.

“You think?”

“So many people now. So much…” She gestures to the scenery outside her window and doesn’t finish her thought.

It’s a lot. He knew it would be a lot. One week hiding in Mike Wheeler’s basement and nearly two years hiding in a cabin in the middle of the woods is hardly enough to undo more than a decade of white floors and walls, fluorescent lighting, hospital gowns, abusive maniacs, and a prison cell standing in for a bedroom.

(He doesn’t know if he could do it, if he were in her place.)

It doesn’t surprise him that she’s overwhelmed. What does surprise him is when she declares, “I can’t do it.” And then adds, in a whisper, “I’m bad at _everything_ ,” and breaks his heart.

His little force of nature, whose soul bleeds with more determination than anyone else he knows, is still just a teenager. A young teenager only recently introduced to society and thrown into the deep end of high school.

Her grades are terrible, even by his standards, which are, admittedly, not high. On one hand, it’s nice that her friends are the nerdiest bunch of smarty-pantses that Hopper has ever met because it means they can help her not fail out of school, and on the other hand, it also means she has to watch them pull straight As and Bs in the _honors_ classes while she struggles to remember the basic rules of grammar.

It’s not for lack of trying. Her affinity for the couch notwithstanding, she works really damn hard. So hard that sometimes _he’s_ the one to pull her away from the textbooks and explain that she doesn’t have to work herself into the ground and there’s more to life than school, anyway, and _go outside, kid. You’ve got 12 years of not being outside to make up for, too._

Honestly, though, when it comes to high school, it’s the social aspect that’s really killing her. The vast majority of Eleven’s limited social skills come from him, and he’s not the greatest example of someone who interacts well with other people. Her friends are loud and annoying but also kind of great, Hop thinks, and if school just meant the six of them, there would be no problems. There are hundreds of other kids, though – way more people than she ever saw in the lab – and they’re not always nice, and Eleven’s mantra, whether she knows it or not, has essentially been _do unto others_ since the day she walked into Benny’s diner.

(Hop was ready to flay her alive the first time he was called to the school and found her trying to stem a bloody nose with a handful of tissues. Her later assurances that the nosebleed was ‘normal’ – meaning it was caused by a good ol’ fashioned hallway fistfight rather than psychic powers – did _not_ make him feel better.)

Hence, Saturday detentions. And regular detentions. And one three-day suspension for a brawl that started with some little shitstain calling Will a nasty name and ended with both Hop _and_ Joyce screaming in the principal’s office, and out of everyone involved in that fight, only the kid named ‘Hopper’ got hit with a suspension.

Granted, only the kid named Hopper actually landed any punches, but still.

“You’re not bad at everything,” Hop says. “No one’s bad at everything.”

“I’m bad at _math_ , I’m bad at _English_ …” She ticks the classes off her fingers. “…I’m bad at _history_ –,”

“Okay, relax.”

“I’m bad at _science_.”

“ _Stop_ , kid.”

“I’m bad at _gym_.”

“I’m bad at all those things, too,” he blurts out. “I was bad at them in high school and I’m still bad at them now. Sometimes it takes a little while to find the stuff you’re really good at. Until then, we just gotta, you know, not worry about the other stuff so much.” It’s not his best pep talk, but she kind of caught him off guard. “Besides, there _are_ things you’re good at.”

“Like what?” she mumbles.

“You’re a hard worker…” Eleven scoffs and turns away from him. He keeps going. “You’re smart, kid. You really are. A lot of smart people are bad at school. You’re, uh…” He falters. She won’t look at him.

It’s almost time for her to report to detention, and while he’s tempted to leave off the conversation here and spend the rest of the morning coming up with the best heart-to-heart anyone has ever delivered to a teenager so he might actually make her feel better for once instead of more miserable, he also doesn’t want to send her inside feeling like shit about herself.

He’s going to regret this.

“And, uh,” he says, “I can think of one other thing.”

As she turns to face him, Hop recognizes the look of dawning realization and knows she knows what he’s talking about.

“ _Secret_ ,” she says.

“Pretty cool secret.” He catches the barest hint of a smile on her face.

He’s _really_ going to regret this.

“Those comic books about Superman, do they talk about how good he is at school?”

“No.”

“Do they show him getting As in math class?”

“No.”

“What about doing book reports for English class?”

“He doesn’t have to. He’s _Superman_.” She points at herself. “ _I_ have to.”

“Yeah,” he admits, rubbing the back of his neck. “But… it isn’t forever. I know it’s hard, and I know it doesn’t make sense, and I’m sorry I can’t make it better for you, but high school is something most people just have to get through. And we’re all in your corner. Me and Joyce, and Will and Jonathan, and all your little friends.” He rolls his eyes. “And Mike.”

El smirks. “Yes.”

“Look, kid, you and I know better than anyone how hard the world can really be and that we don’t always have a choice about what happens to us. But that doesn’t mean we quit trying. We can always choose to do our best, even when the best we can do is not very good. You gotta stop fighting, though. It’s just making an already-tough situation way harder than it needs to be, and you’re gonna get yourself expelled if you keep this up. I’m not telling you not to stand up for yourself or your friends or that violence is never the answer. Bullies are everywhere, not just in high school, and they’re always going to piss you off because you’re a good person and injustice bothers every good person. The problem is injustice isn’t always something you can solve by swinging fists around or by using superpowers. You need all that other stuff you’re so good at that you think doesn’t matter, like being a hard worker, being smart, you know, bravery, kindness, etcetera. That’s the stuff that makes a difference.”

“Superman,” she whispers.

It might be inevitable. Her in a costume, with a mask and cape. Someday. Maybe even someday the thought of it won’t tie his stomach into knots.

Someday is still far away, though.

_Hopefully._

“So, would you please, as much as you can, try to find a way to do the good thing without doing the violent thing?”

“I will try.”

_Good enough_. “And… after you do your time, I’ll tell you why Ms. Ratliff hates you so much, ‘cause that’s kind of my fault.”

“ _Your_ fault?”

“Yeah.” _Me and all those cherry bombs I stuck in her mailbox back in the ‘50s_. “Sorry.” He checks his watch. “You, uh, better get in there before we have to do this again next week.”

Eleven swings the door open but hesitates before she jumps out. “Do you really think I can do it?”

And Hop means it when he says, “I really think you can do _anything._ ”

(Later that night, he finds $40 on his pillow.

It scares him to death. But he takes the money back.)

-

They give back Will’s comic books. They take a break from heart-to-hearts.

And they sit on the front porch and smoke like they’re hiding under the steps between fifth and sixth period.

“You all right?” Joyce asks.

“No.”

She smiles and leans into him. “You’ll be all right.”

-

_Pizza boxes do not fit in trash bags_ , Eleven thinks as she stuffs a particularly greasy box into a particularly full bag, hoping neither of her parents walks in and sees her with her foot in the garbage trying to stomp it down far enough to close the bag well enough to carry it all outside without the top overflowing.

They would just say something like, _you should have taken the trash out sooner._ Which, she should have. But she doesn’t need to hear it.

El ties off the top as best she can and slings the bag over her shoulder so she can take it to the giant trash can next to the porch, which she then has to haul all the way down to the road so the people who drive the garbage truck can take it away in the morning. That is how ‘taking out the trash’ works.

At the cabin, Hop always took their trash away in his police truck or burned it in a barrel out in the woods. Now, it’s a ‘chore’, one of many she’s learned how to do.

Chores are a normal thing. Hands are normal, too, and sometimes El gets in trouble if she doesn’t use them for things like taking out the trash, or doing the dishes, or cleaning her room, because Hop says she’ll grow up with a ‘terrible work ethic’ if she always trades physical labor for mental labor.

(He just worries about her, she knows.)

Hands are slower and more work, but sometimes that’s a good thing. Like now, it affords her the time to look at the stars while she meanders down the driveway, dragging the bin behind her as it jerks and bounces on the gravel.

Eleven plays a game sometimes, privately, where she pretends she’s an alien from outer space and that’s why she has so much trouble adjusting to society and doing conversations with other people and figuring out the rules of this still-strange and still-new world she was suddenly dropped into.

Not ‘abused’ and not ‘neglected’. Just alien.

Like Superman.

The boys like the X-Men, El knows. The X-Men are a team, like the party, where everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and works together to fight the bad guys. Sometimes her friends call her powers an ‘X-Gene’ and Dustin says maybe she should try to find others like her ‘because you can’t be the only one, El, you just can’t’, and her stomach flips over and she doesn’t tell him or anyone else about Kali.

Max likes Wonder Woman because Wonder Woman is a girl and is just as good as the boy superheroes and ‘girls have to stick together’, which El thinks is true. El likes Wonder Woman, too. She likes the story of Diana’s powers coming from the gods, like they’re a gift rather than a mutation or an accident or the result of a horrible experiment.

But when it’s night and El looks up at the stars, it’s not Wonder Woman or the X-Men that her mind goes to but little Clark Kent, who has so many names and was adopted so far from home, caught between where he comes from and where he’s at, and she wonders if he ever looked up at the stars, too, conflicted about it all. He was a baby when he landed on Earth, though, so maybe he didn’t have as much trouble fitting in as El, who didn’t escape the lab until she was 12 (- _ish_ ). But maybe he did. Maybe even surrounded by the people he cared about, and who cared about him, he still found himself a little bit lost and a little bit lonely.

Maybe it scared him, too. The power he had. The things he could do.

El hasn’t decided yet about being a superhero. She likes having the choice, which is why she returned Hop’s money, but there’s a great big world out there, waiting for whatever and whoever she becomes, and it’s a little scary, and awesome, and overwhelming.

Whether she _wants_ to be a superhero, and whether she _should_ , are questions that will need more time to answer.

Clark didn’t become Superman until he was an adult, and he would have had to figure it all out on his own, without a crazy Papa who locked him up in baths or tiny, dark rooms until he broke someone’s neck or crunched their bones against the wall. No one told him the way to move a train or close a gate to another dimension is to tap into your anger and let it fill you up with hatred until you barely recognize yourself and then burn it all out.

No one taught him how to fly.

At some point, he must have simply believed he could and then… jumped.

_I really think you can do anything…_

She’s halfway up the driveway, on her way back inside, when she stops and stares first at the house in front of her, then up at the night sky.

It’s dark.

No one would see.

It’s _possible_.

Maybe… with a running start.

-

Hopper’s flipping through the TV channels trying to find something palatable to waste his evening with when something _slams_ into the roof and then makes a noise like it’s sliding across the shingles before finally dropping into the yard. Hop and Joyce glance at each other, Will and Jonathan come out of their room, and all four hurry outside to find out _what the hell just happened_.

El’s lying on the ground, and Hopper’s heart jumps into his throat. She’s alive, he can tell she’s alive, because her face is contorted in pain and she’s clutching her stomach like one or more ribs are broken.

Lucky it’s not her neck.

Blood from her nose and ears is streaked across her face and the grass by her head, giving her the appearance of a post-prom Carrie White. Joyce and Hop are on either side of her immediately.

“I’m okay,” she wheezes.

_Friends don’t lie_ , Hopper almost retorts.

Quickly scanning the trees around the house, Hop sees nothing that would indicate any sort of threat. Nor does he see anything that would explain why his kid just crashed into their roof. Turning back to El ( _still alive_ ), he winces as she pushes herself into a sitting position.

“Don’t –,” Joyce starts, one hand on El’s shoulder, and then, “Go slow.”

“What happened?” Hop asks.

Still dazed, El _grins_ , showing off a mouthful of blood-stained teeth, and though Hopper asked the question, her gaze lands on Joyce. Then, with an enthusiasm that Hopper’s learned to dread, out of Eleven’s mouth come the words, “I can _fly_.”


End file.
